Article excerpt

A CENTRAL-heating boiler chatting with the dishwasher while the
washing machine makes small talk with visitors?

A scientific revolution as profound as the invention of
printing, or even the development of writing or numbers, promises
to transform the domestic scene and force a reappraisal of our
mental abilities, according to one of the world's leading
researchers in artificial intelligence.

The idea that "intelligence" can truly be a property of anything
other than a human being is deeply controversial. Philosophers
battle over the uniqueness of the human mind and consciousness, but
Prof. Donald Michie, who heads the Turing Institute in Glasgow,
believes machines capable of language and learning will soon be
developed that will challenge and extend human knowledge.

Professor Michie's early career brushed with that of Alan
Turing, the founding father of artificial intelligence, who worked
on Britain's code-cracking effort during World War II. Turing
devised a test which lies at the root of the philosophical
arguments. It said that if a computer program can perform in such a
way that an expert cannot distinguish its performance from that of
a human with a certain mental ability, the program can be said to
have that ability.

The arguments have so far been more theoretical than real.
Computers, although capable of impressive skills, are easily caught
out by many aspects of human intelligence. Most present programs
use deductive reasoning, working from the general to the
particular. The snag is that all the rules have to be worked out
first before giving them to the machine to interpret.

But Michie, formerly at Edinburgh University, where he
established one of the leading artificial intelligence research
groups, sees inductive reasoning, going from the particular to the
general, as the key to machine intelligence. The idea is to give
the machine examples and let it work out the underlying rules that
govern what is going on. Only inductive systems have the ability to
learn.

Michie carried his expertise to the Turing Institute, which he
set up jointly with Jim Alty of the University of Strathclyde six
years ago to bridge the gap between industry and academia in
artificial-intelligence research. His group is among the pioneers
developing such "expert" systems.

A harbinger of things to come, developed by several of the main
computer companies, is an "agent a cartoon figure with whom one can
converse and get help, advice, guidance, and information about what
is going on in the operating system, soon to be available on
computer screens. But Michie believes gradual improvement in the
agents' skills is more likely to undermine than answer the
philosophical issues.

"If eventually we really cannot tell the difference between the
agent and a {human} colleague, we are going to have no more
interest in arguing whether the program is really conscious than I
am concerned with the question of whether my graduate students are
really conscious," he says. …